Chapter 1 the Man and His Psychology
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Chapter 1 The man and his Psychology Jung was a man of paradox. In one sense he was an individualist, a great eccentric. In another he was the living embodiment of the universal man. He strove to realize in his own life his full human potential; but he was determined, at the same time, to live in an uncompromisingly unique way. If this meant upsetting people, as was often the case, he did not, on the whole, seem to mind. ‘To be normal’, he said, ‘is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.’ Although considering himself a rational scientist, he was willing to give his attention to matters conventionally regarded as irrational or esoteric, and he was not unduly perturbed on those occasions when such interests put him beyond the scientific pale. In his view, to adopt an exclusively rational attitude to human psychology was not only inadequate but, in the light of history, preposterous. He had to keep faith with the truth as he saw it, and it was not his fault if this led him into realms of theory and experience which were deeply at variance with the prejudices and preoccupations of his time. ‘I feel it is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery,’ he wrote. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but 1 tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers. (CW VII, para. 201) This sense of being drawn by destiny to swim against the prevailing tide makes him a richly intriguing character. And it means that any book on Jungian psychology has to take full account of the life and personality of its founder, for, more than that of any other psychologist, Jung’s under- standing of humanity grew directly out of his understanding of himself. Throughout his long life, Jung remained a deeply introverted man, more interested in the inner world of dreams and images than in the outer world of people and events. From childhood he possessed a genius for introspection which enabled him to attend closely to experiences proceeding on or below the threshold of consciousness – experiences of which the great majority of us remain almost completely unaware. This gift was derived, at least in part, from the peculiar circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Jung Background Born in the hamlet of Kesswil on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance on 26 July 1875, Jung was the only son of the village pastor, the Reverend Paul Achilles Jung, and Emilie Jung, née Preiswerk. His grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung (1794–1864), after whom he was christened, was a much respected physician, who became Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Freemasons. He was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Goethe. Though he bore a strong physical resemblance to the great poet, this is probably a legend and not fact. Jung’s mother was the youngest daughter of Samuel Preiswerk (1799– 1871), a well-known but eccentric theologian, who devoted his life to studying Hebrew in the belief that it was the language spoken in heaven. He was an early advocate of Zionism, had visions, and held 2 2. The church and rectory at Laufen conversations with the dead. Right up to the time of her marriage, Emilie was obliged to sit behind him as he composed his sermons in The man and his Psychology order to stop the devil peering over his shoulder. Most male members of the large Preiswerk family were clergymen, who shared Samuel’s preoccupation with the occult. This Jung–Preiswerk mixture of medicine, theology, and spiritualism was to have its influence on Carl’s intellectual development. The family moved twice during Jung’s childhood, first to Laufen, near the Falls of the Rhine, when he was six months old, and then to Klein- Hüningen, just outside Basel, when he was 4. Neither of the large vicarages which they inhabited provided a happy environment for a growing child. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes the home atmosphere as ‘unbreathable’: he says he was oppressed with a pervasive sense of death, melancholy, and unease, and with ‘dim intimations of trouble’ between his parents. He tells us that they did not share the same bedroom and that he, Carl, slept with his father. When he was 3, his mother had a breakdown for which she had to spend several months in hospital, and this enforced separation at a critical stage in his development seems to have affected Jung for the rest of his life. This is not an unlikely consequence, for, as has been well 3 established by John Bowlby and his followers, the despair displayed by young children on loss of their mother is a normal response to frustration of their absolute need for her presence. Should this disaster occur, children usually manage to survive, it is true, but at the cost of developing a defensive attitude of emotional detachment, and by becoming self-absorbed and self-reliant to an unusual degree. Typically, they are left with lasting doubts about their capacity to elicit care and affection. They also tend to become odd and aloof in manner, which does not endear them to others. Although Carl was cared for by an aunt and a maid while his mother was away, he recalled being ‘deeply troubled’ by her absence: he suffered from nervous eczema and had terrifying dreams. ‘From then on,’ he says, ‘I always felt mistrustful when the word “love” was spoken. The feeling I associated with “woman” was for a long time that of innate unreliability’ (MDR 23). Jung’s father was a kind, tolerant man, but his son experienced him as powerless, and emotionally immature. Quite early in his ministry, Paul Jung seems to have lost his faith, but, lacking any alternative source of Jung income, felt compelled to persevere with his parish duties. The strain of keeping up the appearance of piety while lacking all religious conviction helped to turn him into a querulous hypochondriac whom it was difficult for his wife and son to love or respect. An only child until his sister Gertrud was born in 1884, Carl was unhappy at school, feeling alienated both from his companions and from his inner self: his rather schizoid (i.e. withdrawn, aloof, and self-absorbed) manner made him unpopular, and the school environment was one in which he just could not flourish. A sense of personal singularity was aggravated by traumatic incidents, as when a master accused him of plagiarizing an essay which he had composed with immense care. When he protested his innocence, his schoolmates sided with the master. Such experiences made him feel ‘branded’ and utterly alone. For a long period he dropped out altogether, having developed a proneness to fainting attacks after a blow on the head when knocked over by another 4 3. Jung’s parents in 1876 boy. (As he lay on the ground, much longer than necessary, he thought to himself, ‘Now you won’t have to go to school any more.’) He spent as much time as he could on his own. ‘I remained alone with my thoughts. On the whole I liked that best. I played alone, daydreamed or strolled in the woods alone, and had a secret world of my own’ (MDR 58). This secret world compensated for his isolation. The fantasies and rituals common to childhood assumed a heightened intensity for him, and they influenced the rest of his life. For example, his adult delight in studying alone in a tower he built for himself at Bollingen on the upper lake of Zürich was anticipated by a childhood ritual in which he kept a carved manikin in a pencil box hidden away on a beam in the vicarage attic. From time to time, he visited the manikin and presented him with scrolls written in a secret language to provide him with a library in the fastness of his attic retreat. This gave Carl a feeling of ‘newly won security’ which sustained him through his father’s irritable moods, his mother’s depressive invalidism, and his ‘alienation’ at school. ‘No one Jung could discover my secret and destroy it. I felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with myself was gone’ (MDR 34). Another childhood ritual prepared him for his later insights into the importance of projection in psychology. It was an imaginative game which he played as he sat on a large stone in the garden. He would intone, ‘I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath.’ Immediately, the stone would reply, ‘I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.’ Then he would ask himself, ‘Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’ This left him with ‘a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness’, but he knew that his secret relationship with the stone held some unfathomable significance (MDR 33). In this game we can trace the origins of Jung’s mature insight into the mysteries of alchemy – that the alchemists had projected the contents of their own psyches into the materials on which they worked in their laboratories. 6 Jung’s adult delight in solitude, his alchemical studies, and his research into the dynamics of psychic transformation were also foreshadowed in an adolescent fantasy which entertained him as he walked each day from the vicarage at Klein-Hüningen to the school he attended in Basel.